Epileptinomicon are a band I know pretty much nothing about. I don’t know how many people are involved, I don’t know if they’ve put out anything other than the two CD-Rs on Sleeping Giant Glossolalia, I don’t even know if they still exist (although judging by the fact that this was only released last year, I think it’s safe to assume they’re still hanging around).

All I know is that Changeling House Summer is a warped beast of treacherous blackened murky drones. This record is full of crazy fucked jams sounding like they were recorded in a dark hidden corner of the Murder Castle, looped & based, crackling amps spewing brownout sludge from busted electronics, cracked guitars, and worn drum machines, burnt out feedback riding alongside pulsing synths, howling wind blowing through jail-barred windows and kicking up blood caked dust in your FACE.

An absolutely killer twisted mess of a record, one which I’m not certain is totally out of print, but the label’s not selling it in their store and it’s not an easy one to find so here ya go. Have at it, thank me when your hair’s standing on end and your eyes are permanently bloodshot.

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Isounderscore is a tightly curated label, this being only the fifth release in 2 years, and each one being a total fucking winner. So that means whenever they put something out, you know it’s going to be fucking top notch. Rale’s new LP is no different. William Hutson has been hiding on the West Coast, releasing a little here and there, staying mostly below the radar. But I think Some Kissed Charms The Would Not Protect Them is going to be the one that will undeniably prove his holy awesomeness to everyone with blinders on.

Some Kissed Charms is a mostly minimal, mostly synthy drone monster, spicing things up with some noise & field recordings (I think?) on two side long pieces. The A side is a heaving sweetheart, giving you massive swells of dense intimidation, never breaking any volume records or shattering eardrums, but glowing bright & loud enough to make your knees quake a bit. But in between those swells are loooong drawn out bouts of nothing. Literally, multiple minutes go by with nothing but the texture of vinyl and your surrounding white noise, making each listening experience entirely different from the next. Walking home late at night with this on the headphones, for example, is a fantastic way to listen to this, as the occasional car passes by, mimicking the rise & fall of the drones on the record. Too fucking cool. Eventually the silent spurts turn into a high end unnerving ambience, along the lines of bowed metal, then some distant helicopters get mixed in, each successive “in between” lull adding a little more, but always the waves of beautiful hypnotic clarity continue to wash up, and ending just as the B side starts, creating a smooth transition to the otherwise intrusive physicality of flipping the record.

The B side is starts out rearing its head in the same slow pulsing way as before, but the repetitive swells don’t last, instead going for a minimally textured glitched bubbling weave, like melting icicles on top of a blanket of thick tones. Rather than letting your environment paint a picture for you like on the A side, Rale does all the heavy lifting, conjuring images of watching a thunderstorm roll in on the beach, the dripping ice turning into rain drops piercing raincoats, wind whipping tarps against the sand, blowing a soothing grit into the mic, breathing in the salted air and waiting for the storm to reach shore, only to find that it just misses the coast and you see the tail end of it, safe from the expected destruction, the rain still pelting your face, worse than before, but enjoying it without fear and wallowing in the glory of the lightening sky, the majesty of nature beautifully overwhelming.

So Rale’s new record is pretty fucking astounding. If this can’t convince people of his greatness, nothing can. BUT ACT FAST, only 300 copies were made, and they are insanely awesome to behold. Just like Acre’s Isolationist, that image up there looks like ass compared to the real deal. It’s a bright neon blue jacket with silver foil stamping, artwork done by none other than Brandon Nickell himself. Hot. As. Fuck.

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The very first release from Rubber City Noise, a bizarre tape of hypno synth noise by Cane Swords, aka Curt Brown & Karl Vorndran. These two dudes created spacey nightmares with a traditional smorgasbord of electronics, plus some hacked shit like a circuit bent Buddha Machine, handmade phaser, RCN Hello Kitty Ring Mod, and the requisite infinite blue light.

Big Warmup In The Mouth Of Eternity is a fucking journey and a half. Layers upon layers of static & space dust, glitches & anti-matter. They build dense clouds of electro mist, raining ice crystals down through murky tumble drones, bubbling swamps of gamma rays, pulsars of technoise in a blazin hot swarm. It’s pure fucking chaos without relying on an ear-rupturing brain fuck. They wobble down a line of immersive bliss and sloppy malarkey, keeping you totally locked in, scanning for the brief moments of enlightenment.

Pillaging from the maelstroms in mid-century electronics and sci-fi soundtracks, Cane Swords take the current smear of synths and throw their own blend of insanity into the mix. Big Warmup is goddamn fantastic, an hour long disarray of non-abrasive synth noise that spits in your face and tells you to chill the fuck out. Honestly can’t wait to see what both this new label & band have coming up. RCN is gonna be a label to keep your hawkeye on, that’s for damn sure, because they’re packaging is sweet as hell and they do free downloads of most of their releases, INCLUDING THIS ONE, so fucking GRAB. IT.

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I always get simultaneously inspired and downtrodden when someone like Chica X comes along. Xiola Tapia is only 11 years old and is already making bizarre electro hip hop jams. She put out a full length & a split (with Hewhocorrupts) by the time she was 8. It makes me ashamed to be 15 years older than this girl and not having accomplished anything even half as cool. But this isn’t just about me being a mopey bastard. This is about Chica X.

A little tape lasting less than 10 minutes comes out next week on Hewhocorrupts Inc and it’s innnsaaaane. Chica X makes some minimal beats with a deep love for the crazy, lots of wacky scratching, buzzing blats, thunder bass, looped police sirens, and a relentless danceability. And while the drum beats & synths keep shit interesting, the music gets overshadowed by Chica’s amazing lyrics. A lot of it isn’t too thematically radical, songs about money, dancing, partying on the weekend, etc, but then there’s the nuggets of brilliance that, when heard coming from a pre-teen girl, is just fuckin unreal. Like on “Da Bank (1, 2, Step)” where she calls out “I got a lotta guts to get up on stage. Suck it up punk, you ain’t never gettin laid. I’m just learnin how to flow.”

Then there’s the lyrics that could ONLY come from a pre-teen girl and that’s what makes me want to listen to this again and again. I could hear her rapping “I’m on my Malibu bike and I’m feelin kinda happy” or “To the library, and step on it!” over weirdo electro hip-hop pop beats all fucking day. I’m pretty sure Chica’s going places and I can’t wait to see what kind of glittering wisdom she boils up in the next few years. But for now, just gonna “Dance with Chica tonight.”

I’m giving yall some deathly tunes to prepare yourselves for the upcoming apocalypse. Harold Camping has predicted that The Rapture is this Saturday, May 21, 2011 and who am I to disagree? He wouldn’t just make something like that up, right? I mean, The Bible guarantees it! So I figured that since I’m obviously going to HEAVEN, I should make one last mix and pack it full of killer jams that I’d be proud to listen to as I get sucked up out of my clothes.

Making this mix was insanely fun and, GOD FORBID you make it past this Saturday, I recommend making an Apocamix yourself. ‘Cause ya never know when you’re gonna need another one.

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I went certifiably insane for the last/debut Caddywhompus record, Remainder. Seriously, there are few records over a year old that still get that much playtime from me. Then two months ago, courtesy of Chinquapin & Community Records, they dropped a new single called “Age Of Wild Spirits” and it was killer. Got me totally stoked for the upcoming The Weight, which, just like Remainder is free of charge, meaning you should go download that shit STAT (or better yet, drop some $$$ on it and hold it IRL). Then when The Weight came around, I discovered it only has 4 songs, one of which we’d already heard. Mega-bummer. BUT WAIT this is Caddy-fuckin-whompus and The Weight is still one of the best mathy noise-pop albums to come out this year so fucking HOORAY.

I don’t really want to recycle the same comparisons from before, but they’re still quite approriate. There’s Zach Hill drum love affairs, Dodos style vocals, the blistering nastiness of Oxes, and fuckit throw in some Deerhoof because what’s a noise-pop review without mention of them. But what makes Caddywhompus BETTER than all of those bands is their absolutely brilliant songwriting, every song being a straightup earworm, and having the best fucking mix of abrasion & bliss. Every song has me simultaneously air drumming & guitaring while flailing uncontrollably during the massive breakdowns, where they’re able to maintain a beautiful pop charm right alongside the thrashing & squawking.

I’m pretty sure The Weight is a step in a slightly more refined Caddywhompus sound, but I honestly can’t tell you what that step is because I’m too fucking distracted by the unmatched awesomeness being laid down. Plus I’m wayyy too busy listening to this to bother to go back and compare it to Remainder. When The Weight is playing, everything else becomes second rate, including previous Caddywhompus records.

I wish there was something, anything I could do to make Caddywhompus stand out even more. They deserve the highest praise and arena sized audiences freaking out to their totally fucking killer anthems. It blows my mind that I’m trying to hype this band because that means they don’t already have it. WTF is wrong with all of you? It is now your duty to tell every goddamn friend of yours about Caddywhompus and make sure they all own a copy of Remainder and The Weight.

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I’m not sure I’m going to be able to convey how totally fucking twisted Freddy Krueger Death Chant is. Edasi’s lineup is constantly shifting, but the core is a single dude from Estonia who has a deeeep hatred for Freddy Krueger stemming from Krueger’s “stupid” clothes, “lame jokes and that unconvincing evil laugh.” Inspired by voodoo rituals in Interview With A Vampire, Edasi made this record because he was hooked on “the idea of channeling your hateful resistance through the evil demonic music.”

Freddy Krueger Death Chant is a 75 minute track with the most fucked sounds and Edasi chanting in a caustic bubbling haunted whisper “Freddy Krueger, Freddy Krueger, burn in helllll” over and over again, with the occasional “Freddy fucking Kruger, Freddy fucking Krueger…” If the hypnotic lyrics weren’t enough, the music is INSANE, defying any and all levels of sub-genre. It’s black and relentless as fuck, a mess of skull fucking psych-noise, a gritty guitar blowing out spite, a drum beat that has no beat, high-end feedback skree, scratched & plucked acid strings, and a dozen layers of unrecognizable warped decay.

And it just keeps going. This is the longest 75 minute album I’ve ever listened to and definitely one of the most grating. I imagine he did this in real time without any looping, just jammed pure black psych for over an hour, then shot up with wolf blood and went into a trance attempting to conjure Satan and permanently send Krueger to hell with his death chant. I’m pretty sure there’s only one intended listener for this piece of filth, and it’s not you or me. Edasi says in his mission statement “it’s supposed to go on and on until the listener’s (hypothetically Freddy) senses are destroyed and his will and focus are lost.” It’s like witnessing a possessed beast holding a terrifyingly kvlt private seance, one we definitely shouldn’t be seeing but now that we’re here, there’s no fucking way we’re leaving.

P.S. New badass label alert! KV&GR is a small label devoted to bringing “the most underground and avant garde black metal, doom, dark ambient, drone, noise, kvlt and grim audio terrorism.” They put out some CRAZY releases. I also picked up a doomed black metal record with a knife and fucking power saw listed as instruments. They’re all limited and seem to go quick so keep a keen eye on that shit.

Sorry I can’t do a grand suspenseful reveal or anything because of that image up there. PATRICK LOY IS THE WINNER! He wins. He is an excellent haiku writer. He is in tune with the Enemies List. He is soon to be the proud owner of Mamaleek’sKurdaitcha on glorious EL vinyl. Way to fucking go! You should not hate Patrick because he beat you, you should be his friend because he is awesome. And you should also go buy a copy of Kurdaitcha because now you’re fucking missing out. Or go hang out with Patrick and listen to his copy.

I gotta say, you guys are some fucking quality haiku writers. SO many killer haikus. It was insanely difficult picking just one to be “the one.” And it feels wrong to withhold from you the wondrous poems that I got to read, so I’ll share some others that were on the brink of win.

Bass drum pounds our skulls.
Drones wash on, hands touch heavens.
“We wish we were dead.”
-Sam Finer
(If I had to pick a second place, this was probably it. Almost won me over with the excellent choice of lyrics and having a similar haiku style as me.)

It is Krampus Kore:
Scraping your ears like old sticks,
Belching out soul dust.
-Andy Freeburg
(got extra points for including this photo of the Kramps)

When business taints art
Deliver me, sound from blood
Industry killing
-Lukas McCutcheon
(totally nailed some of the EL ideas for me)

i should win your game
because i will then wait for
black metal mailed
-Ed Blair
(I wanted to make Ed wait for black metal records in the mail so bad)

And then there was top notch linguist Mr. Kestigian (of America Addio fame and participant in the HANL liveexperience) who has one of the best Twitter accounts ever. I was tempted to rule him out because of his association with EL but decided that was unfair (I never stipulated any such restrictions). He submitted a bunch of haikus and they were all fantastic. Here’s a sampling…

New absolutely gorgeous Mountains video for “Blue Lanterns On East Oxford” shot by Koen Holtkamp himself. It starts out with some puffy sped up/slow-mo clouds, then goes to a dazzling display of abstracted water that fits the twinkling synths perfectly, then fades back to some symmetrical clouds AND OMFG IT’S MANDELBROTTT <3

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KILLER SPLIT CITY. Almost TOO much awesome running through this tape. High Aura’d, Boston’s “up and coming” guitar droner John Kolodij, who probably got a lot of worshippers when they saw him opening for Barn Owl on tour last year, teams up with André Foisy, one half of the Locrian duo, who somehow manages to singlehandedly retain all the brilliance of Locrian.

Kolodij takes the A side with “Dusk Latitudes,” a 20+ drift through hazey space/time curves. His Americana stylings don’t show up immediately, instead doing some heavy breathing with the strings & pulses, layin the foundation for the resonant steel slides to come. It’s a foreboding piece, the unnerving tones that ring in your head the moments between the challenge to an old fashioned gun slinging duel and the duel itself. And then at about 7:45, the fucking chaos reigns down, blood pounding through your ears and clouding your eyes, heavy scary shit, a wall of reverb that only lasts as long as the gunfight, and the remainder is you lying full of holes in the bloody dust, surrounded by thick layers of warm drones, looking up at the enlightening sky, thinking about the sincere & beautiful. Truly fantastic stuff right here.

Foisy’s untitled piece is an amazingly perfect companion to “Dusk Latitudes,” the blackened psych string drones that saturate the afterlife. Not overly bleak in the beginning, it weaves a grey SotL/KBD type classical, with distant thunder and a deep sobriety, building patiently upon layers of tension, each minute that passes increasing the sense of gorgeous dread, eventually bringing in somber monk-like vocals that are buried in the gloom. The elegance of this is that it escalates to pillars of dense, grandiose, and terrifying noise drone but you don’t notice until it’s toppling over you with tortured screaming, a fury of electronics, and buzzing riffage that pours out of your speakers, black, painful, and loud as fuck.

I definitely didn’t imagine that High Aura’d & André Foisy would make a solid gold split together, but holy fuck this tape is unbelievable. Stunned always does great work but they totally outdid themselves with this one. Just fucking incredible stuff from both of these guys. Now is it too much to ask for a collaboration?

Between the first and second Sonorium, the wait was about a fuckin yeeaaarrrrr. Now, just three months after #2, Andrea & Vanessa have already gotten #3 ready to go and the lineup is as sweet as ever. Still keeping their homebase at The Griffen Theatre in Salem, they’ve gotten a slew of Mass based heroes and weirdos from afar. There’s the indescribable insanity of Preggy Peggy & The Lazy Babymakers (duo of Angela Sawyer of the infallible Weirdo Records and James Apt), freaky folk Whitehausers Peace, Loving, and minimal electro-acoustic composer Lou Bunk all out of Boston, then Diagram A comes in from Western Mass to destroy shit in an electronic thunderstorm. Distant out-of-towners are Brooklyn’s HAG (trio of David Grollman, Brad Henkel, & Sean Ali) and Californians Horaflora.

Pretty pumped about this lineup, all the more so because it’s right down the street from me. Still, even if you’re in the Boston area, this is totally worth it to come up. Lots of awesomeness going down on a Saturday night that currently doesn’t have much else goin for it.

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It’s been awhile since I’ve reviewed anything from Semata, one of Boston’s top notch cool shit purveyors, even though they’ve put out some seriously fantastic albums. So why did I choose to review a record that’s technically a reissue? Because Demon Seed barely saw the light of day with it’s 40 tape run on YDLMIER (not that Semata’s 200 LP run is that much better), because it sounds disgustingly great on vinyl, and because it’s fucking INSANE.

Scuba Death is apparently a “mystery artist.” That’s a topic I don’t really want to get in to, I’ll save it for another post, but lets just say I don’t dig the whole “mystery” thing. An alias is fine, but especially in a place like Boston, it just seems a little ridiculous to put out an album and purposefully keep the identity secret. But whatever. It adds to the intrigue, I suppose. So let your imagination run wild with who Scuba Death actually is, I’ll take bets.

Demon Seed is a short, potent dose of grimy & grim electronics. 45 RPM, one song per side, you get almost 20 minutes of no nonsense destructive filth that sounds like your stereo is recovering from a trip to the acid sauna. Nothing about this record sounds “right,” it literally sounds like they fucked everything up, sent you a broken piece of wax, and your needle is caught in a steel wool loop. The electronics are beyond repair, failed industrial static that grates from lo-fi smoke drone to power surge blowouts to contact feedback glitch to panned jet engine horror. I hate the idea of stealing other people’s descriptions but Brad Rose fuckin nailed it on Twitter when he said “i have to keep double checking to make sure my turntable isn’t on fire or something.”

So, yeah, this is some unusually bizarro noise, but it’s also bleak as fuck. It sounds like it came from an acrid tomb, sealed away for a thousand sunless years, encrusted with dense layers of dust, past decay, and embracing all things deathly. This is black noise stemming from crumbling electronics and it fucking DESTROYS.

Scuba Death could be literally anyone and I wouldn’t care. It doesn’t matter. Demon Seed is a fucking beast and it’s a goddamn miracle that Semata sought to spread the noise. So what have we learned from all of this? 1: Your copy of Demon Seed is not defective. 2: Keep an eye on YDLMIER.

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HOLY SHIT THIS IS MY FIRST EVER GIVEAWAY. Kind psyched about that. Always thought about doing it but never had something good enough to give away. So when I accidentally pre-ordered two copies of Mamaleek’s Kurdaitcha, I figured if I was dumb enough to not notice I paid for two, then I wouldn’t miss the money that much. So I said “Fuck the refund, give it away to your awesome readers.” You benefit from my stupidity.

Here’s what’s at stake: One copy of Mamaleek’s brand new, just released by Enemies List, hot off the vinyl presses Kurdaitcha. It’s got some sweet ass gold foil stamping on the front for their logo, it has a full color insert, and the record itself weighs about 10 pounds. Fucking heavyWEIGHT. There were only 150 of these motherfuckers made. Super deluxe stuff coming from Enemies List. And the music on here is fucking INCREDIBLE. I already reviewed it (as well as Mamaleek’s self titled debut), so if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll know this shit is for real. Crazy fucking black metal with worldly twisted sounds running through, made by 2 mysterious San Franciscans. It’s beautiful & destructive and totally fucking awesome.

So, how do you go about winning one of these glorious records? Pretty simple. I’m a fan of the haiku, so I want you to write one about Enemies List. I figured not everyone knows about the amazing Mamaleek yet, so it might be hard to write a Mamaleek haiku. But Enemies List is literally THEE greatest record label right now (well, maybe tied with Important) and everyone should fucking worship them. So write an ode to EL in haiku form and email it to me by next Tuesday, May 10 at 6:00 (EST) at justin [at] antigravitybunny [dot] com with the subject “Mamaleek Contest.” I’ll pick my favorite and share it with you dear readers (and maybe some runners up if they’re good enough).

Think you can handle that? I know, the awesomeness is overwhelming. If you need a tip, chill out, grab a pot of coffee, and let the caffeine write the haiku for you. And if you don’t win, fear not, I’ll still think you’re cool, and there’s still a few Kurdaitcha copies left that you should buy.